What do you get when you cross a dessert plate with an ice-cube tray? An ice cream bowl that melts after use, so you don’t have to wash it.

This is one of many ridiculous ideas in John Cassidy and Brendan Boyle’s The Klutz Book of Inventions. As you might have guessed, the intention of this book is to make people comfortable with creating ridiculous, unusual and at first sight useless ideas. To get more inspiration of ridiculous ideas, check out Chindōgu, which is the Japanese art of “..inventing ingenious everyday gadgets that seem like an ideal solution to a particular problem, but are in fact useless”.

The ability to combine unusual ideas is key to innovation and is an essential part of any creative process. Combining the unusual helps you to break established frames and forces you to rethink of what you know in order to come up with innovative ideas.
One way to practice combining the unusual and ridiculous is to take part in the New Yorker Cartin Caption Contest. Every week the New Yorker has a cartoon without a caption and they ask the audience to come up with a caption that describes the cartoon with max. 250 characters.

This was the comic from the contest #592:

The winning caption: “I’m afraid this whole experiment is about to go south.” Submitted by Ken Schimpf, New York, N.Y.
So, take part in the challenge!

This week’s comic for the contest:

What caption would you create?

Submit your idea here and share it with me by sending me an Email to gerhard@lupoworld.com.